Emerald Fennell's adaptation teems with anachronisms.
However, the reliance on the carnal and sensual is untethered from the question of social class and money critical to the 19th century classic.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are woefully miscast in the film that mistakenly pivots a tortured romance at its heart.
Some adaptations leap so off centre they make you wonder if it’s even the same text you thought you knew. In interviews, Emerald Fennell has called Wuthering Heights the definitive book of her life. She has spoken ad nauseam how she wants to make audiences cry so hard they’ll vomit. Webbed with pain and passion, the classic demands you wrestle with it. The density makes for an active reading experience. Pinning the material down becomes as much of an ask as a strange gratification. Fennell views Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel only through the prism of sadomasochism, a perplexing decision that becomes the film’s biggest undoing. In fact, there’s an odd, grating hangover from her previous film, Saltburn (2023). Garish maximalism is slapped ugly all over Suzie Davies’ production design. The sensual becomes Fennell’s narrative and aesthetic fabric, obliterating nuance, complexity, the enormous spectre of social class and hierarchy. She makes one bewildering adaptative choice after another. Depravity props up everywhere, transgression leaching through the film as slime. Fennell opens ‘Wuthering Heights’ with extended blank-screen lingering. Sexually redolent sounds make way for a scene of public hangings. It’s a compelling start, establishing how Fennell will constantly twine suffering and erotic peaks.
Catherine’s father brings home to Wuthering Heights a boy he found on the streets. It’s she who names him Heathcliff. Charlotte Mellington plays the young Cathy with a strong precociousness. Cathy’s father, Mr Earnshaw doesn’t waste a moment to demonstrate how generous he has been in plucking Heathcliff from poverty, even as he stipulates the boy is just Cathy’s pet and another of their servants. But Cathy instantly takes to him. The years pass, the attraction between Cathy and Heathcliff grows only headier. The family house slips deeper into ruin as Mr Earnshaw squanders away on gambling. The ticket out is the new rich neighbour at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). There’s miscommunication, some orchestration by the house-help Nelly (Hong Chau), eventually Cathy’s marriage to Edgar. A heartbroken Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) disappears from Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) life, only to return years later to greater emotional chaos.
While the first half still has some spurts of frisson, it all falls apart with Heathcliff’s return. Fennell’s screenplay crumples under a lack of purpose, ill-defined characters. The doomed lovers frolic and pine and tear themselves to shreds, as Linton and his ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) get caught in their destructive trail.
Anachronisms can be fun and teasing if its full potential is tapped. However, it can just as well be an utter trainwreck with Fennell mistaking them as bland provocations. She has every right to accent her spin with her personal responses over the years, drumming up what are tinges of subtexts in then novel. However, the problem here is a complete bypassing of critical tensions in the source text that are at its very heart. Major characters are chopped out, rendering the core of revenge acutely missing or sorely misplaced. Key motivations are absent, muddling character dynamics. Isabella’s relationship with Heathcliff is unforgivably flipped from obviously abusive to consensual. Isabella, poorly subjected by Heathcliff, is nevertheless drawn to him. The entire pact of their marriage, where he lays it clear he’s doing it just to torment Cathy, gives Isabella her warped pleasure. Hence, her letters to Nelly on his bestiality land as grotesque, misshapen amusements.
In a head-scratching omission, Cathy’s brother is shunted in the adaptation, razing central ideas around avenging class-inflected abasement. Fennell redirects all the book’s unwieldy conflicts into a watered-down tortured romance. Her Cathy and Heathcliff get more of each other than Brontë had ever alluded. A montage with the two devouring one another in carriages, the rains and every other clandestine place, has no heat despite the surging sex. There’s no funnelling towards a coherent, cohesive vision. Fennell is so bent on scaling the film up as cool and hip, to set thirst traps for Gen Z the book itself seems traded off. The question of social class, integral to the book, is defanged, left in the cold after mildly evoked in the start. Hence, Fennell’s Heathcliff remains vaporous, his lashing fury and its crux as in the book wholly excised. He's a man who's been hurt and abused, turning that as the springboard for his vendetta. Here, Heathcliff has been tamed to appease the palette of a woke audience.
Fennell's lens is solely directed towards fetishising. She clearly luxuriates in the visual baroque. Linus Sandgren’s camera extracts passages of startling magnificence, but it’s all so unmoored from thematic bite nothing quite sticks the landing. The latter sections feel utterly confused and wayward, clueless what to do with its wild emotions. The result is a film bizarrely indulgent in perverse excesses that go nowhere. Strains of intense agony, languishing in lovelorn desperation are awfully literalised. Iconic lines like Heathcliff’s “I can follow you like a dog to the end of the world” find blunt, embarrassing visual capitulation as well. Neither Robbie nor Elordi ever quite tips into place, the former sporadically dishing out cruelty and anguish, the latter a one-dimensional brooder. The very pitch of Robbie’s performance comes off as inconsistent. There’s a lot of wall-scratching and licking, characters crawling as dogs, jutting a finger into a fish. All this is for no rhyme or reason. ‘Wuthering Heights’ remains only concerned with the carnal suspended in a thematic vacuum, forgetting everything else driving its characters.
